Homework Helper

Adding homework to calendar and asking a math question.

Inspiration

Our inspiration was the people we know in our lives that are disorganized in terms of school assignments. We've had friends who always struggle on remembering the date of a test, or the due date of an assignment. We've known friends who've pulled all nighters to study because they forgot their exams. That's why we decided to build this software to help students like them.

What it does

First of all, lets talk about how to use our software to better understand the features of it. Our software is compatible with google assistant and google calendar so it will work on android, the web and all other platforms supporting google assistant. All you have to do is tell google assistant to add your homework assignment and it will automatically appear on your personal google calendar! Additionally, you can ask the chat bot to help you with homework with basic questions like math and general knowledge. You can also access the bot on the site we created. Our website consists of the chat bot on the left side of the screen and your personal calendar on the right side.

Now, lets talk about the functions and features of our program. The first one is adding and scheduling homework assignments. Each homework task scheduled has an importance level extracted from the original query. This importance level determines how many times the user is reminded of his or her assignment. There are 3 levels of importance. There are "Very important", "Important", and "not important" (the assignment is not important if user does not specify importance level). "Very important" will remind the user the day before the due date, 2 days before the due date, and 5 days before the due date. "Important" will only remind you the day before the due date. If importance level is not specified, the user will not be reminded.

The second feature of the Homework Helper is that it can send a list of the students upcoming homework assignments and their dates to their parent's email. The user will have to specify their parents' email address.

The third feature of the Homework Helper is that it can help you with certain questions like: "What is 6.23 * 7.43".

How we built it

We built the chat bot with dialog flow and the back end with python and flask. We also used html and css to make the simple website. We used ngrok and flask to deal with back end.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into is when we had to send a response from our python script back to the chat bot in order to make our program capable of answering simple questions like calculations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the accomplishments that we are the most proud of is that our program is compatible with Google Calendar and Google assistant. That means our program can be used pretty much universally. We were also pretty proud of ourselves when we made it possible for the python script to send back responses to the chat bot. It took us around 6 hours to accomplish that.

What we learned

Building this program has been a very valuable experience for us. In the last 24 hours, we learnt and a lot of things that can help us a it in making future programs. Firstly, we've deepened our knowledge of python by a lot. We've worked with scripts that we've never encountered before, but we understood them and successfully implemented them. Secondly, we've learnt how to build chat bots using dialog flow. Thirdly, we learned how to use flask to create servers with Ngrok. We've also learned a lot about Ngrok during this Hackathon. Lastly, we learned about Google Calendar API and how to implement it in our software.

In conclusion, we've learned a lot of new concepts that can be very useful in future projects during this Hackathon.

What's next for Homework Helper

Our next goal for Homework Helper is to make it possible for the user to run it on his own without needing to have a server. Also we would like to make the website look more professional.